The United States National Security Agency spied on French presidents Jacques Chirac, Nicolas Sarkozy and Francois Hollande, WikiLeaks said in a press statement published on Tuesday, citing top secret intelligence reports and technical documents.

The revelations were first reported in French daily Liberation and on news website Mediapart, which said the NSA spied on the presidents during a period of at least 2006 until May 2012, the month Hollande took over from Sarkozy.

New York City police officials provided the first in-depth look Tuesday at a new policing strategy they say will put more beat cops in neighborhood precincts to improve the relationship between officers and the communities they serve.

NYPD Commissioner William Bratton said the neighborhood policing plan would use staffing changes and other tactics to restore faith in a department that, in an era of historically low crime, still struggles to boost the morale of its own officers and gain the trust of mostly minority residents in the city's toughest neighborhoods.

The online retailer Amazon will remove all Confederate flag merchandise from its website, a move that comes amid growing public criticism and skyrocketing sales of the so-called "Southern cross," a spokesperson confirmed Tuesday.

Amazon's decision, first reported by CNN's M.J. Lee, came after similar moves by Wal-Mart, Sears and eBay, all of which have pulled sales of Confederate flag merchandise over the past 24 hours. In that same time period, Amazon had seen its sales of Confederate flags grow by more than 3,000 percent.

eBay said in a statement today that it will ban Confederate flag-themed items, immediately, following in the footsteps of Walmart, Sears and K-Mart.

“We have decided to prohibit Confederate flags, and many items containing this image, because we believe it has become a contemporary symbol of divisiveness and racism,” the spokesperson said in a statement.

Virginia will phase out vehicle license plates featuring the Confederate battle flag, the state's governor said on Tuesday, following the fatal shootings of nine black worshipers at a historic South Carolina church, allegedly by a white gunman.

The state, which was part of the pro-slavery Confederacy in the U.S. Civil War, will no longer allow specialty license plates for the Sons of Confederate Veterans group that feature the flag, said Governor Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat.